CHAPTER XIV FIAM OVERLOOKS THE BATTLE

I don’t know how he managed it, but he understood the man?uvres of war better than I. You see, Hajis are unusually intelligent. Often I couldn’t make out what was going on. I could see soldiers running, firing, apparently turning back, cavalry galloping, and could hear the roar of cannon on all sides, yet I couldn’t tell how the battle was going. But he explained everything to me.

“Look there at that hill. Do you see they are attacking? Look to the left; that is an assault. There are ten thousand men. Bravo, advance!” He would get wildly enthusiastic, running here and there and shouting orders in his squeaky little voice, screaming encouragement, reproof, praise and blame. You ought to have heard him calling: “Re?nforcements to the right! Place two batteries behind that hill! Forward with the reserves! Smash their entrenchments!” He seemed to think himself the general.

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I often relied entirely on him for information. I put my hat, with him on it, on the branch of a tree or on top of a cane and went tranquilly to sleep near my horse browsing in the grass. When I awoke I called:

“Fiam, who is winning?”

“If you are awake,” he answered, “we will go and send a telegram to your journal.”

Then I would put him in the hat band, mount my horse and gallop away to the nearest military telegraph station.

We had many curious expressions. He could never understand firearms. The discharge of muskets he called little thunder, and that of cannon big thunder. He thought that men really hurled thunderbolts. When I tried to explain to him about guns and cannon he would respond:

“All right! All right! But the fact is that these machines which work with that thing you call powder are nothing but factories of thunderbolts of various [113] sizes, and we can prove it, because we see and hear both the lightning and the thunder.”

“WHO IS WINNING?”

Another of his ideas was that the telegraph was nothing but a Haji. For him it was a live Haji in a copper wire that carried the messages. He spoke of it as “my brother of the wire.”

I tried to tell him about it: “But no, dear Fiam. This time it is really a thunderbolt that carries the message.”

“Truly!” he exclaimed sceptically. “And where is the lightning, where is the thunder? I should think that you would admit that I, a Haji, understand such things a little better than you.”

The telegrams that he dictated to me and that I had to alter in private, usually began this way: “Brother of the wire, go and say to our friends in Europe and America that to-day after four hours of big and little thunder, etc.”

Seeing him so infatuated with fighting, I said to him once:

“It appears to me, Fiam——”

“Miferino!”

“That you love war!”

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“Not at all. Do you think any one could love slaughter?”

“But you think of nothing else!”

“That is true. This is a question of my country, so I would like to be a soldier and fight with all my strength. I swear to you I wouldn’t mind dying. Just think that the future of the country for centuries and centuries, its prosperity and greatness, depend upon our victory. Hurrah for the war!”

“Brave Fiam, you are a good citizen.”